Berkeley Lab Scientists
Played Key Role in RHIC Experiments

Creation of quark gluon plasma would provide insight into formation
of the Universe

By Lynn Yarris

There was a strong Berkeley Lab
connection to the announcement last week from Brookhaven National Laboratory
(BNL) that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has created the
hottest, most dense matter ever observed.

Experimental results have given RHIC researchers confidence that they
are “on the right path” to discovering a quark-gluon plasma
— an elusive form of matter be-lieved to have existed in the first
microseconds after the universe was born. Resear-chers with Berkeley Lab’s
Nuclear Science Division (NSD) played key roles in both the theoretical
and experimental components of these results.

The STAR detector at Brookhaven
was used to track particles for the quark-gluon plasma experiment.
The centerpiece of STAR — the Time Projection Chamber —
was designed and built at Berkeley Lab. Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt

On June 18, a special scientific colloquium was held at BNL to discuss
the latest findings at RHIC, the world’s lar-gest facility for research
in nuclear physics. RHIC is designed to recreate the hot, dense conditions
of the early universe. At this colloquium, it was announced that in the
detector system known as STAR (for Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) head-on
collisions between two beams of gold nuclei resulted in a phenomenon called
“jet quenching.” By comparison, in collisions between a beam
of gold nuclei and a beam of deuterons, this phenomenon was not obser-ved.
STAR, along with the three other experiments at RHIC — PHENIX, BRAHMS
and PHOBOS — all detected a suppression of “leading particles,”
highly energetic individual particles that emerge from nuclear fireballs,
in the gold-gold collisions. Jet quenching and leading particle suppression
are predicted to be signs of a quark-gluon plasma formation.

“The observation of jet quenching represents a giant step forward
and brings us to the cusp of discovery of the elusive quark-gluon plasma,”
says Xin-Nian Wang, head of NSD’s Nuclear Theory Program. “Much
work is still needed to find out the detailed properties of the dense
matter, such as its equation of state and whether color deconfinement
is achieved, however, taken together with other observed phenomena like
collective flow, it should not take too long to conclude that a quark-gluon
plasma has indeed been made at RHIC.”

Wang, along with Miklos Gyulassy, who is now at Columbia University,
developed the theory that links jet quenching to quark-gluon plasma. Jets
are energetic beams of ordinary particles produced when a pair of quarks
are knocked out of a proton or neutron during a collision between atomic
nuclei. The quarks, moving in opposite directions, one going in towards
the nucleus, the other away from it, quickly transform into two back-to-back
jets that shoot out in opposite directions from the nuclear fireball.
It was the contention of Wang and Gyulassy that if a quark-gluon plasma
were to be created, the jet moving toward the nucleus would be drained
of energy, or “quenched,” so that it could not escape the
fireball.

“Analyzing how the jets propagate through the fireball and measuring
the amount of quenching that occurs should reveal whether or not a quark-gluon
plasma was created,” Wang says.

Starting in 2001, researchers at RHIC generated thousands of head-on
collisions between the nuclei of gold atoms (79 protons and 118 neutrons)
at energies of 100 billion electron volts (100 GeV) per nucleon. The temperature
of the nuclear matter in these collisions approached one trillion degrees
above absolute zero (about 300 million times hotter than the surface of
the sun), which is thought to be hot enough to “melt” the
gold nuclei into their constituent quarks and gluons and allow these particles
to briefly exist free of one another in the soup-like quark-gluon plasma.
Quarks are one of the basic constituents of matter. Gluons are carriers
of the strong force that binds quarks together into protons or neutrons.
In the ordinary matter that makes up the world in which we live, quarks
are never free of other quarks or gluons.

As different from ordinary matter as water is from ice or steam, the
quark-gluon plasma is believed to have been the state of matter that prevailed
in the first 10 microseconds after the Big Bang. Though it immediately
cooled to the ordinary state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma set the
stage for creating the particles that make up our universe today. The
ability to produce a quark-gluon plasma at RHIC should yield new insights
into how our universe was formed and a better understanding of the behavior
of atomic nuclei.

To search for the presence of a quark-gluon plasma, the RHIC researchers
simultaneously tracked and identified thousands of particles in the debris
of their heavy ion collisions. STAR was the only experiment to detect
single jets emerging from the collisions between the dual beams of gold
nuclei., but in order to draw any conclusions, the researchers needed
to compare the gold-gold collision data to collisions in which they would
expect to see no jet quenching or suppression of leading particles.

From January to March of this year, researchers at RHIC generated head-on
collisions between beams of gold nuclei and beams of deuterons, nuclei
consisting of one proton and one neutron. These deuteron-gold experiments,
along with experiments using two colliding beams of protons, served as
a basis for comparison with the collisions between two beams of gold nuclei.
This time the researchers observed back-to-back jets and recorded more
leading particles coming from the deuteron-gold collisions.

Hans Georg Ritter, the physicist who heads NSD’s Relativistic
Nuclear Collisions program, says, “It is the consensus that the
quark-gluon plasma has not been found yet, but jet quenching is an exciting
new phenomenon that is unique to RHIC.”

The findings of the STAR experiment were presented at the BNL colloquium
by NSD physicist Peter Jacobs. NSD’s David Hardtke developed the
method used to analyze the jets in the gold-gold collisions and did the
comparison analysis which established that jet quenching was taking place.
The analyses were done at the Parallel Distributed Systems Facility at
NERSC. The centerpiece of STAR is a Time Projection Chamber, or TPC, which
was designed and built by scientists, engineers and technicians in NSD
and the Engi-neering Division (ED).

Construction of the $15 million TPC for STAR was led by NSD physicist
Howard Wieman and ED engineer Russ Wells. Construction of the entire $60
million STAR detection system was overseen by NSD physicist Jay Marx and
ED engineer Bill Edwards.

And the Oscar for Best Performace in
a Non-Credit Role Goes to Berkeley Lab

By Ron Kolb

Perhaps in the context of 138 minutes and $150 million, Berkeley Lab’s
time on the screen is minimal. But without it, the Hulk doesn’t
become incredible, Bruce Banner and Betty Ross don’t have a place
to work, and nutty David Banner doesn’t get his genes jumbled in
the first place.
Ang Lee’s summer blockbuster “The Hulk” opened to mixed
reviews and a huge audience response last weekend, but Berkeley Lab —
plot device and location for several key scenes — was nowhere to
be found among the screen credits. A shame, too, since the place and its
instrumentation look so darn good.

Pay attention during the first (long) hour, because that’s where
the Lab — not the Hulk, unfortunately for monster fans — will
appear. Eric Bana (the young scientist Banner) and Jennifer Connelly (the
young scientist Ross) work at someplace called the Berkeley Nuclear Biotechnology
Institute, a low-paying genetics lab in the East Bay Hills overlooking
San Francisco, looking very much like … the Advanced Light Source.
There’s Bana, in Army-green jacket with shoulder pack and speed
helmet, bicycling onto the ALS patio and parking his bike at a now-non-existent
rack.

That scene, and several others, were shot here during a long weekend
in April 2002. But when Bana gets off his bike and walks into the ALS
— er, BNBI — he is greeted by original Hulk creator Stan Lee
and original TV Hulk Lou Ferrigno, here doing cameos with a Bana stand-in.
That part of the scene was shot on a Monday this past April.

Connelly and film heavy Josh Lucas next appear in a brief encounter at
the ALS lobby elevator — a scene that probably lasts about 10 seconds
but which director Lee took close to two hours and 20 takes to film. A
brief time later, Bana is filmed coasting down Lawrence Road at dusk,
the sparkling SF skyline in the distance. Impressive, though only seconds
in length.

Throughout this interpersonal activity, the intrigue of the Gamma-sphere
looms. Universal built a three-quarter-sized model in the studio based
upon the Berkeley-made original, now detecting gamma rays at Argonne.
The architecture is stunning on film, and even the dialogue nonsense about
“nanomeds” can’t distract from its scientific sheen.
Bana endures radiation from an accident there, clutching the detectors
of the globe-shaped instrument (never mind that the real thing measures
gamma rays and does not emit them).

(Bottom) The real Gammasphere
at Berkeley Lab does not emit, but detects gamma rays. Photo by
Roy Kaltschmidt

The inevitable chain of events is set, and in a few moments, the movie’s
key scene — and the Laboratory’s piece de résistance
— is served up. The now-Hulked-up Banner triggers alarms, and that
brings the police to the site (screeching to a stop behind Building 10).
Occupants flee (screaming extras emerging from the ALS front door and
running across the patio). The Hulk throws the gammasphere skyward, and
it smashes through the ALS outer wall, its number “6” unmistakable
amid the chaos. The flying orb lands on top of the police car and its
occupants dive out of the away (onto a mattress landing, as the explosively
rigged stunt car implodes).

When he last visited in April, Lee had just seen the final cuts of that
scene at Industrial Light and Magic in Marin County, where the Hulk and
other computerized scenes were created. He described it has “the
most difficult and complicated digital scene ever filmed.” It is
impressive.

The ALS was also used for an indoor flashback scene at a secret military
research facility somewhere in the desert. A young David Banner, played
by shaggy-haired actor Paul Kersey, is seen frantically flipping and punching
switches and buttons before rushing up some stairs to escape the inevitable
disaster behind him. The whole sequence was shot at the floor-level controls
inside the storage ring at the ALS.

"Hulk" director
Ang Lee and producer Gale Ann Hurd review fresh footage during their
April 2002 shoot in the ALS.

And late in the picture, a wistful Betty Ross peers through the blinds
of a window, gazing anxiously through trees at the dramatic night skyline
of the city. The window was actually a prop on a forklift in the ALS parking
lot, the leaves swaying from the effects of a huge electric fan.

Speaking of fans, the Hulk attracted enough of them last weekend to
set an income record for a summer release opening — $62.6 million.
For the realistic look and feel of a science laboratory, they can thank
Berkeley Lab, even if Universal Studios chose not to.

Lab Outlines Plans for New Building,
Parking Lot

By Ron Kolb

A new building designed to ease the overcrowding of office space at
Berkeley Lab has been proposed for construction on site next year. A 120-car
parking lot, planned to be built with the excavated soil, will also alleviate
parking problems at the Lab.

Artist’s rendition of the proposed new six-story building to
be built on the slope above the Blackberry Gate by fall of 2005.

An environmental impact report (EIR) will be prepared for the project,
and a public “scoping” meeting has been scheduled for next
Monday, June 30, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Cen-ter, 1901
Hearst Ave. The meeting is designed to help establish the content of relevant
environmental information to be studied.

The six-story, 65,000-square-foot structure would be erected just above
the Blackberry Gate and just below the Building 50 complex, on the southeast
side of Cyclotron Road. Since the purpose of Building 49, as it is now
called, will be to relocate up to 240 current emp-loyees, no net increase
of staff or automobile traffic is anticipated.

Although the programs to be accommodated in the building have not yet
been identified, there will be no research lab space included.

One unique aspect of the project is its funding structure. For the first
time here, an outside developer will hold the ground lease and will own,
finance, design, build and manage the new office building. The Univ-ersity
of California will lease the building on a year-to-year basis for Berkeley
Lab’s use.

A “notice of preparation” of the EIR has been issued. The
review period for comments on the preparation of the EIR for the project
is 32 days, from June 16 to July 18. A copy of the notice, which includes
a summary project description and the proposed scope of the EIR, can be
downloaded from the Laboratory website at http:// www.lbl.gov/Community/
env-rev-docs.html.
At the scoping meeting on Monday, Berkeley Lab officials will provide
information about the pro-cess as mandated by the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA), give an overview of the project, identify environmental
impact areas to be analyzed in the Draft EIR, and listen to public comment
on the scope of the EIR analysis.

The current schedule calls for issuing the EIR for public comment around
Aug. 15, holding a public meeting on the EIR about Sept. 15, and submitting
a final EIR to the UC Regents for approval next January. Construction
could begin next spring, and the building and parking lot should be completed
by fall of 2005.

The federal General Services Administration recommends that facilities
like Berkeley Lab have 135 net square feet of primary office space per
person. The Lab’s current sitewide space allocation is about 100
net square feet per person, hence the urgency of the project.

The proposed reuse of the soil as a parking lot will be a productive,
cost-effective and environmentally preferred alternative to hauling excavated
soil off site, a process that would involve an estimated 4,300 one-way
truck trips through city streets. The new lot, designated as “G-4,”
would be located east of building 70A.

Comments on the plan may be sent to Jeff Philliber, the Lab’s
environmental planning coordinator, at MS90K. He will also answer questions
at X5257.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

This hungry, smiling goat is but one of 350 now-familiar summer visitors
on the Hill, here to do a job, not just make silly faces. The goats —
part of a mixed herd, most of them angora — act as Mother Nature’s
best fire control system. Three hundred of these voracious eaters can
clear one acre of vegetation per day, or 40 to 50 acres at the Lab each
season.

Herded by Oscar Iturra from Chile, they are managed by Goats R Us of
Orinda and guarded here by Winnie the dog.

Goats R Us runs a ranch with 3,000 goats in Orinda and one in Calaveras
County, where the old goats go to retire.

When last seen, the goats were munching their way through Blackberry
Canyon.
Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt

Help Document ALS History for 10th Anniversary

The Advanced Light Source will be 10 years old in October, and you are
invited to share your memories of this eventful decade with organizers
who are planning the festivities.

Do you have stories about the early years of the ALS, or historical
insights (and hindsights) about its construction? Were you there when
the first light shone through a beamline? Do you have a story to tell
or a photo to show? If so, contact the planners of the ALS 10-year anniversary
at als10years@lbl.gov.

Organizers would also like to hear from anyone who would like to participate
in planning the celebration or who have suggestions or information to
share.

Mathematicians Win Prestigious New Prize

By John Bashor

John B. Bell and Phillip Colella of the Computational Research Division
are corecipients of the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering,
awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathem-atics (SIAM)
and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

John Bell

The prize, awarded for the first time this year, honors outstanding contributions
to the development and use of mathematical and computational tools and
methods for the solution of science and engineering problems.

Algorithms developed by Bell and Colella and their research groups at
Berkeley Lab are used to study complex problems arising in fluid mecha-nics
and computational physics. The methodology they have developed has been
applied in such diverse areas as shock physics, turbulence, astrophysics,
flow in porous media and combustion.

Much of their research is funded through DOE’s Office of Science
and its Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) and Scientific Discovery
through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) programs.

Ray Orbach, director of the Office of Science, praised Bell and Colella
for “devoting their talents to tackling problems of global significance.”

Phillip Colella

One of the current projects in the Center for Computational Sciences
and Engineering, led by Bell, focuses on three-dimensional simulations
of turbulent methane combustion. The goal of these simulations is to model
turbulence-chemistry interactions to predict not only the basic energetics
of the flame but also to quantify the detailed chemical behavior within
the flame. The results, to be presented at an international conference
this summer, are the first fully resolved simulations of methane combustion
with comprehensive chemistry for a laboratory-scale flame, and provide
an unprecedented view of the detailed processes occurring in methane combustion.

The principal focus of Colella’s current work is the development
of new simulation software tools for multiscale problems in science and
engineering. Applications include non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics problems
arising in magnetic fusion; beam dynamics in accelerator design problems;
simulation of gas jets in laser-driven plasma-wakefield accelerators;
multiphase flow in microgravity environments; geophysical and environmental
fluid mechanics; and detailed spatial modeling of microbes.

Colella also leads a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Computational Technologies
project to develop algorithms and software for the simulation of multiphase
flow and star formation.

Bell and Colella will be presented with the prize on June 17 at the
2003 SIAM Annual Meeting, to be held jointly with the Canadian Applied
and Industrial Mathematics Society’s annual meeting in Montreal,
Canada.

Berkeley Lab Currents

Published twice a month by the
Communications Department for the employees and retirees of Ernest Orlando
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Berkeley Lab is managed by the University of California
for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Lab Physicist Challenges Speed of
Gravity Claim

By Lynn Yarris

Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same
speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory
has not yet been proven. A physicist at Berkeley Lab says the announcement
by two scientists about the speed of gravity, widely reported this past
January, was wrong.

Jupiter’s rare alignment with a quasar was the basis for an
attempt to measure the speed of gravity. Image courtesy of NASA.

Stuart Samuel, a participating scientist with the Theory Group of Berkeley
Lab’s Physics Division, in a paper published in Physical Review
Letters, has demonstrated that an “ill-advised” assumption
made in the earlier claim led to an unwarranted conclusion.

“Einstein may be correct about the speed of gravity, but the experiment
in question neither confirms nor refutes this,” says Samuel. “In
effect, the experiment was measuring effects associated with the propagation
of light, not the speed of gravity.”

According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, light and
gravity travel at the same speed, about 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers)
per second. Most scientists believe this is true, but the assumption was
that it could only be proven through the detection of gravity waves. Sergei
Kopeikin, a University of Missouri physicist, and Edward Fomalont, an
astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), believed
there was an alternative.

On Sept. 8, 2002, the planet Jupiter passed almost directly in front
of the radio waves coming from a quasar, a star-like object in the center
of a galaxy billions of light-years away. When this happened, Jupiter’s
gravity bent the quasar’s radio waves, causing a slight delay in
their arrival on Earth. Kopeikin believed the length of time that the
radio waves would be delayed would depend upon the speed at which gravity
propagates from Jupiter.

To measure the delay, Fomalont set up an interferometry system using
the NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array, a group of ten 25-meter radio
telescopes distributed across the continental United States, Hawaii, and
the Virgin Islands, plus the 100-meter Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany.
Kopeikin then took the data and calculated velocity-dependent effects.
His calculations appeared to show that the speed at which gravity was
being propagated from Jupiter matched the speed of light to within 20
percent. The scientists announced their findings in January at the annual
meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Samuel argues that Kopeikin erred when he based his calculations on Jupiter’s
position at the time the quasar’s radio waves reached Earth, rather
than the position of Jupiter when the radio waves passed by that planet.

“The original idea behind the experiment was to use the effects
of Jupiter’s motion on quasar-signal time-delays to measure the
propagation of gravity,” he says. “If gravity acts instantly,
then the gravitational force would be determined by the position of Jupiter
at the time when the quasar’s signal passed by the planet.

“If, on the other hand, the speed of gravity were finite, then
the strength of gravity would be determined by the position of Jupiter
at a slightly earlier time, so as to allow for the propagation of gravitational
effects.”

Samuel was able to simplify the calculations of the velocity-dependent
effects by shifting from a reference frame in which Jupiter is moving,
as was used by Kopeikin, to a reference frame in which Jupiter is stationary
and Earth is moving. When he did this, Samuel found a formula that differed
from the one used by Kopeikin to analyze the data.

Under this new formula, the velocity-dependent effects were considerably
smaller. Even though Fomalont was able to measure a time delay of about
5 trillionths of a second, this was not nearly sensitive enough to measure
the actual gravitational influence of Jupiter.

“With the correct formula, the effects of the motion of Jupiter
on the quasar-signal time-delay are at least 100 times and perhaps even
a thousand times smaller than could have been measured by the array of
radio telescopes that Fomalont used,” Samuel says. “There’s
a reasonable chance that such measurements might one day be used to define
the speed of gravity, but they just aren’t doable with our current
technology.”

Imaging the Smallest, Lightest Metal
Atoms

First Look at Lithium Atoms

By Paul Preuss

Only atoms of hydrogen and helium are smaller than those of lithium,
a soft, white metal. While it’s possible to image even hydrogen
on a surface, trying to look at lithium inside a crystal is a challenge
of an altogether different sort.

A simulation program shows how the arrangement of lithium ions (tan)
among cobalt (blue) and oxygen (red) atoms in lithium cobalt oxide
ought to appear. The closely matching experimental image obtained
with the OÅM is inset in black and white.

For the first time, in a quest driven by scientific curiosity, technical
virtuosity, and practical demands as well, MIT and Berkeley Lab resear-chers
have used the One Angstrom Microscope (OÅM) at the National Center
for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) to make transmission electron microscope
images of lithium atoms.

Because they store more energy for their weight, operate at a higher
voltage, and hold a charge much longer than other rechargeable batteries,
lithium ion batteries sales in the U.S. approach $2 billion annually.
Laptop computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and many other devices
use them today; tomorrow, cars may too.

In 2001, Yang Shao-Horn, now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering
at MIT, was investigating lithium ion batteries with colleagues at the
University of Bordeaux I. These batteries operate by reversibly inserting
and removing lithium ions from positive and negative electrodes; 3-D studies
of their vagrant ions is a key to better performance.

X-ray diffraction and neutron powder diffraction have been used to examine
the structure of the most common electrode material, lithium cobalt oxide.
But lithium ions have never been seen by these techniques, nor had they
been seen in previous attempts with electron microscopy.
So that summer, when Shao-Horn approached Michael O’Keefe of Berkeley
Lab’s Materials Sciences Division to ask whether it would be possible
to image lithium ions with a transmission electron microscope (TEM), he
answered “I don’t think so.”

Resolution at the limit

An electron beam traveling through a thin sample of material scatters
from atomic nuclei and surrounding clouds of electrons. Unique arrangements
of atoms signally affect the phase of the beam (the relative spacing between
its waves), and upon exiting the surface of the sample it can be focused
by an electromagnetic lens to project an image of columns of atoms.

Atoms with diminutive dimensions and tiny mass barely affect the electron
beam and are hard to resolve — a problem that gets worse when heavier
atoms lurk nearby. In lithium cobalt oxide, layers of lithium atoms lie
between slabs of cobalt and oxygen. Heavy cobalt, with atomic number 27
and atomic mass approaching 60, is relatively easy to image. Light oxygen,
with atomic number 8 and atomic mass about 16, scatters electrons weakly,
and lithium is smaller still, its atomic number only 3, its atomic mass
only 7.

While a TEM’s ability to image these wispy particles depends mostly
on its specifications, it’s possible to go beyond the microscope’s
so-called native resolution to its “information limit” —
the maximum amount of information that can be extracted from the scattered
electron wave, in phase or out.

One method, called focal-series reconstruction, uses a computer to combine
successive images, each made at a slightly different focus. But there’s
a catch. In-phase images of atoms in one image will be out of phase in
another. How can the computer tell where bright spots, dim spots, or no
spots at all belong in the composite image?

The right number of blobs

One way is to create a computer simulation of what the microscope ideally
ought to see — “the right number of blobs for the right number
of atoms,” as O’Keefe puts it.

O’Keefe, who pioneered image simulation programs in the late 1970s,
used a recent version to assess the chances of imaging lithium cobalt
oxide. His initial skepticism began to wane when the simulation showed
that under the right conditions, all three kinds of atoms should be clearly
visible at a resolution of 0.8 angstrom — just within the OÅM’s
reach.

Yang Shao-Horn in her lab at MIT
Photo by Donna Cokeney, MIT

In 2002, Shao-Horn, working with NCEM’s Chris Nelson to master
the microscope’s operation, obtained many focal series of crystals
from a powder sample prepared in collaboration with her French colleagues.
She and O’Keefe worked backwards from these experimental images
to produce representations of the electron wave leaving the exit surface
of the specimen. One image among their results matched the simulation.

“The atomic resolution of lithium atoms is a novel and significant
achievement, with implications for better understanding not only of lithium
ion battery materials but of many other electroceramic materials as well,”
says Shao-Horn.

Says O’Keefe, “We have shown that the range of the OÅM,
and mid-voltage microscopes like it, can be extended all the way from
heavy atoms down through oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon to the lightest
metal — in fact, except for helium and hydrogen, the lightest atoms
of all.”

“Atomic resolution of lithium ions in LiCoO2,” by Yang Shao-Horn,
Laurence Croguennec, Claude Delmas, E. Chris Nelson, and Michael O’Keefe,
will appear in the July 2003 issue of Nature Materials.

Engineering Task Force Grapples with Change

By Paul Preuss

Delivering a challenge for challenging times, Berkeley Lab’s deputy
director for Operations, Sally Benson, opened an all-day plenary session
of the newly established Engineering Task Force on June 16 in the Building
50 auditorium.

“As the Lab’s scientific programs change, it’s the
Engineering Division that could play the role of taking discovery to application,”
she said. “I want us to take that next step.”

Led by Laboratory project management officer Kem Robinson and coleaders
Peter Denes of the Engineering Division and Roderich Keller of the Accelerator
and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), the task force began work May 9,
charged to recommend ways to maintain a stable environment for staff engineers
while providing state-of-the-art technical expertise — all this
in the face of large fluctuations in funding.

Benson emphasized that it is a “dynamic and opportune time”
to weigh the division’s mission, capabilities, needs, organization,
and management; to look for fresh ideas from Lab employees and the best
practices of outside organizations; and, as part of an overall review
of Berkeley Lab strategies, to produce a “set of well-informed recommendations”
by Sept. 1.

Benson added that, while it’s helpful to know how we got where
we are now, “the value is in looking forward.”

Jim Triplett, the division’s director, was the first of many speakers
to address both sides of that equation in a no-punches-pulled talk: to
understand both the present situation and what’s needed to get where
we want to go — and moreover, Triplett said wryly, “to do
all this without money.”
The need for traditional “big iron” projects in the General
Sciences has steadily waned, and the challenges of nanoscience, biophysics,
and other emerging fields, like spaceborne detectors for the SNAP satellite,
demand new kinds of tools and expertise. Engineering’s resources
are strained and, after many months of Reductions in Force, its people
are anxious.

Triplett outlined a classic dilemma for successful organizations in
a changing environment. On the one hand, adaptation requires investment
— in up-to-date machinery and computer hardware and software —
and recruitment of people comfortable at the cutting edge, often right
out of school.
On the other hand, decreasing funds mean workforce reduction, often the
most recently hired. The impact on recruitment can be brutal. Meanwhile
working space deteriorates and funds for training and travel dry up.

Increasingly the choice looks to be between, in Triplett’s words,
a large group of “low-cost, generic engineers working with obsolete
equipment” or a few “high-cost, highly trained people working
with specialized, state of the art equipment” — neither choice
acceptable for Berkeley Lab.

Triplett outlined a number of initial steps, including facilities like
the flexible new Design Works; better communication among the far-flung
members of the division, many of whom are matrixed to other divisions
like the Advanced Light Source (ALS); closer cooperation with UC Berkeley;
and collaborations with other labs.

Throughout the day at the plenary session, Engineering Task Force members
heard from the heads of the Engineering Division’s departments of
mechanical, electronics, and software engineering, design and fabrication,
engineering science, and industrial and energy partnerships, as well as
from representatives of the Earth Sciences Division, ALS, AFRD, Physics,
and other partners.
These contributions sharpened Triplett’s assessment. When Triplett
said, “We are the canary in the coal mine for the Lab — we
take the hit first,” it was a reminder that engineering has been
a pillar of the Laboratory since Ernest Lawrence founded it.

The Engineering Task Force seeks the widest possible input from the
Lab community. E-mail sent to etf@lbl.gov
will go directly to leaders Robinson, Keller and Denes and no further.
All input will be treated as strictly confidential.

Task Force members include Alan Biocca, Alessandro Ratti, Daryl Oshatz,
Henrik Von Der Lippe, Jian Jin, Ross Schlueter, all from Engineering;
Damir Sudar of Life Sciences, Helmuth Spieler of Physics, Howard Padmore
of the ALS, John Corlett of AFRD, Robert Shoenlein of Materials Sciences,
and Jane Baynes of the Deputy Director’s Office. Genomics, Earth
Sciences, and the Environ- mental Energy Technologies Divisions will be
represent as well. For more information see the Task Force website at
http://www.lbl.gov/~etf/.

Summer Lectures to Showcase Energy
Efficient Technologies

As temperatures soar and the summer lecture series gets into full swing,
come see how Berkeley Lab scientists are working to save energy.

Steve Visco (top) will look at solid oxide fuel cells that could generate
cheap electricity on July 2. The following Wednesday, Michael Siminovich
will talk about the energy efficient Berkeley Lamp.

On July 2, Steve Visco of the Materials Sciences Division will discuss
the development of a solid oxide fuel cell that promises to generate electricity
as cheaply as the most efficient gas turbine. His innovation, which paves
the way for pollution-free power generators that serve neighborhoods and
industrial sites, lies in replacing ceramic electrodes with stainless-steel-supported
electrodes that are stronger, easier to manufacture, and, most importantly,
cheaper. This latter advantage marks a turning point in the push to develop
commercially viable fuel cells.

In addition, the electrode means fuel cells are closer to breaking the
cost barrier than ever before. That barrier is $400 per kilowatt, a stringent
bar set by the Department of Energy’s Solid State Energy Conver-sion
Alliance, a government, industry, and scientific group tasked with developing
affordable fuel cell-based power generators. The $400 target — nearly
one-tenth the cost of today’s fuel cells — is equivalent to
the most efficient gas turbines and diesel generators, and is based on
the premise that a fuel cell’s success hinges on its competitiveness.

On July 9, Michael Siminovitch, a scientist in the Environmental Energy
Technologies Division, will showcase the Berkeley Lamp, a fluorescent
table lamp that can reduce lighting costs by up to 50 percent. At full
power, the two-lamp fluorescent system exceeds the combined luminous output
of a 300-watt halogen lamp and a 150-watt incandescent lamp while using
a quarter of the energy.

The Berkeley Lamp also emits light uniformly, meaning no glaring, eye-fatiguing
hotspots. And it looks good. Its sleek design and easy controls ensure
that any desk can accommodate it and anyone can use it, allowing people
to create their own lighting, instead of coping with whatever was installed
in their office years ago. It also sports two high-performance, compact
fluorescent lamps, each fully dimmable and independently controlled. Separated
by a reflector bowl, one lamp projects light downward to illuminate the
desk, the other projects light upward to provide indirect, ambient lighting.

— Dan Krotz

Bette Muhammad Thanks Lab Colleagues
For Support During Daughter’s Ordeal

By Monica Friedlander

Missing children cases seldom have a happy ending. Berkeley Lab employee
Bette Muhammad considers herself among the lucky few to have lived through
one. In spite of having endured one of the most harrowing ordeals a mother
can ever go through, Muhammad is counting her blessings that her 22-year-old
daughter, abducted last month, is alive and safe at home.

Hana Muhammad, 22, was abducted for two and a half days last month.
She is now safely back home.

What sustained Muhammad through a two-and-a-half-day nightmare, she says,
was the outpouring of love and support from her friends and colleagues,
including many here at the Lab, where she has worked for the past 30 years.

To all of them, she would like to extend a big thank you and let them
know Hana is back home.

“Hundreds of people send cards, e-mails, flowers,” Muhammad
says. “I just want to let them know Hana is safe and to thank everyone
for their prayers and support.”

Her daughter, a recent graduate of Dominican College in San Rafael,
disappeared on May 28 during her lunch break outside her job at a skin
care center on Townsend Street in San Francisco.
When she didn’t show up at home that night, Muhammad tried to call
and page her, all to no avail. Late at night she called the Oakland Police.
The local news media got the ball rolling in the search. Flyers with Hana’s
picture were posted everywhere, from San Francisco to Richmond. For more
than two days, her family feared the worst.

On May 31 Hana was found before 6 a.m., wandering barefoot through a
McDonald’s parking lot in Union City, after being released by her
abductors. She was shaken and bruised, her mother says, but she was not
sexually assaulted and is now recovering.

“The police told us the outcome is never like this, that they
usually have to call parents to tell them their child is gone. So it’s
a blessing for us.”

Muhammad is still shaken by the experience. She would rather talk about
the generosity and friendship of her colleagues than about the ordeal.

“Something like this really makes you see the human side of people,”
she says. “It brings out the best in everyone. The outpouring of
love and affection was just overwhelming.”

Muhammad is especially thankful to Ron Woods, who offered her vacation
time, and Ilham AlMahamid, who took her home, cooked dinner, and in every
other way comforted her at the most critical time. “She rescued
me,” Muhammad says.

Muhammad, a radiation technician in EH&S, has two other children:
a 18-year-old daughter at home and an 20-year-old son in college in Arizona.

FBI Video at Computer Protection Brown Bag

“Solar Sunrise: Dawn of a New Threat” will be shown at the next
Computer Protection Brown Bag, to be held on Tuesday, July 8 at noon in
Building 70A-3377. This video, produced in cooperation with the FBI and
the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), portrays an FBI/NIPC
computer hacker investigation involving attacks on U.S. computer systems.

Windows Desktop Systems Security
Course

Users of Windows 95, 98, Me, Windows NT Workstation, Win-dows 2000 Professional,
or Win-dows XP who have not taken Berkeley Lab’s short course on securing
desktop systems are en-couraged to attend the next Win-dows Desktop Security
Course, to be held Wednesday, July 9 from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. in the Building
50 auditorium. Presented by the Computer Protection program, the course
will highlight the importance of joining a domain, running and updating
antivirus software, protecting share access, running only necessary services,
and other safe computing practices. To enroll, see https://hris.lbl.gov.

MoveSMART Training Open for Registration

Lab employees who regularly engage in moving or lifting activities are
invited to learn safety information and skills in field and office environments
at one of the two MoveSMART training workshops being offered next week
by EH&S Training. Space fills quickly, so early signup is encouraged.

The June 30 classes will be held at 8:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., and the July
1 classes at 8:30 a.m. Refresher classes are scheduled for July 1 and
2. For information, call X7366. To register, see https://hris.lbl.gov/self_service/training/.

Performance Review Correction

The June 13 article on the performance review cycle inadvertently implied
that the information applied labwide. The deadlines were only for the Lab
Directorate and General Sciences Divisions. For questions regarding the
performance review cycle, please contact your Human Resources Center.

WANTED

CAMP SITE TO SHARE, Reggae on the River, wish to share your camp site
at Richardson Grove, Ben Bow or close by, will pay all fees + some $,
have sm pop-up tent trailer, need rm for 4, Linda, X7649, lgwieczorek
@lbl.gov

LOST

Flea Market Policy

Ads are accepted only from LBNL
employees, retirees, and onsite DOE personnel. Only items of your own
personal property may be offered for sale.

Submissions must include name, affiliation, extension,
and home phone. Ads must be submitted in writing (e-mail: fleamarket@lbl.gov,
fax: X6641, or mailed/delivered to Bldg. 65.

Ads run one issue only unless resubmitted, and are repeated
only as space permits.

The deadline for the May 30 issue is Thursday, May 22.

First Day of Summer: A Class Act

A classic car show and barbecue greeted the first day of summer last
Friday at Berkeley Lab. The cafeteria parking lot hosted historic rods
while the Rhythm and Blues Band provided equally hot musical entertainment.
Photos by Roy Kaltschmidt